What If

There is a lifelong tussle going on between who we are and what we want to be. Like a guiding star, the latter pulls us out of our comfort zone and makes us work to move from the first state to the second. It is what that makes us wake up every morning. Do what we (don’t) like. Go to places that we (don’t) want. And say things which we (don’t) like. For if we were happy doing what we doing in an absolute sense, then we would stagnate, choking on our own comfort.

It is good, this fight between I (now) & I (could have been). “What If?”

It his healthy and motivating and nurturing. But for some this fights mutates into something ominous. A fight that tuns into who we were and what we could have been. This is a fight in the past. A cry for an alternate reality where we imagine a better past to serve us a better present. This is a drug of the highest effect, making us dissolve our reality in the sea of the past, where our fanciest of dreams come true, our most intimate desires becoming a reality.

This is a state of perpetual dream where we are perfect physically (taller, fairer, leaner), mentally (smarter, wiser). We build alternate worlds one after other, a different setting but the basic ingredient being the same -‘WHAT IF’. And we drink glasses after glasses of it, session after session getting intoxicated and lost and hallucinated, and in the process losing our reality in exchange.

We have to understand that ‘What if’ is not an option today, neither it was yesterday, nor it will be tomorrow. ‘What if’ is only a chimera that takes multiple forms, only to entice us into a whirlpool of nothingness. Our pages of lives are tainted with it. We have to replace ‘What if’ with ‘What now’, easier said than done, but it is our last resort, the only resort for those of us who have fallen into this bottomless abyss.